WooCommerce Related products, Up-Sells and Cross-Sells Explained

When you work with WooCommerce products there are several ways to stimulate customers to buy other products. Often we talk about related or recommended products when we talk about products we want customers to buy on top of the one they are considering buying or put into their cart. In WooCommerce speak we talk about related products, up-sells and cross-sells. Let’s go through WooCommerce Related products, Up-Sells and Cross-Sells one by one here, shall we?

Related Products

Related products are products that are loaded below an individual product when they have something in common. They are related in some way. This commonality can be based on two things:

tags the product is tagged with

categories the product is under

So, to make related products work, or at least work on product pages you have to do the following. You should give your product tags so they can share those among each other and connect or relate that way. The other option is to put the products into categories. That way they can be connected by category. If you do not do either one of these related products won’t work well.

Up-Sells

Upselling means suggesting more expensive or better quality products for example. These products can be added manually to each product in the backend. You do this under product data (simple product) > linked products field:

When you click on the field it will ask you to add three characters so it can try to guess the product you want to connect it to:

Cross-Sells

Cross selling – suggesting product on the cart page before customers goes to the checkout – is something else. It does work in the same way as up-sells in the backend. You add cross-sells the same way. Where it differs is that cross-sells are offered in the cart view:

So if you would like to make customers buy other products before they go to the checkout cross-sells are the way to go.

Summary

Well, I think we covered WooCommerce Related products, Up-Sells and Cross-Sells pretty well here. Do make sure you use these options. They will helop you increase your sales. Displaying related products, doing cross-sells or up-sells simply work really well. In increases your bottom line big time. That is why big stores use these techniques.

What is not covered here is trying to sell products on the checkout page nor suggested sales based on history or email campaigns suggesting products based on past sales. For that I will create another blog post or two one of these days.

Jasper has been working with web frameworks and applications such as Laravel, Magento and his favorite CMS WordPress including Roots Trellis and Sage for more than a decade. He helps customers with web design and online marketing. Services provided are web design, ecommerce, SEO, content marketing. When Jasper is not coding, marketing a website, reading about the web or dreaming the internet of things he plays with his son, travels or run a few blocks.